Wall, 60, was inspired by the paintings of Goya and Manet and the work has a "psychological resonance", Ms Crombie said. The man is not just untangling rope but grappling with the "confusion of modern life".

As art critic Jean-Pierre Criqui wrote in the international journal ArtForum in 1996: " Untangling, 1994, depicts a man in work clothes busy untangling a thick skein of rope that suggests a strange, vanquished monster. This picture has a directly mythological resonance: the individual's struggle to escape the tangled threads of fate that control his destiny reads as an allegory for the construction of meaning."

Why can't they just say, "it's a picture of some person untangling ropes."